Piquing curiosity, or “How to scratch the surface”

Another in the series of “reviewer feedback I’m going to deal with using dicey justification techniques” for Brownfield Application Development. This time, there were concerns that the topics covered in the book don’t go in-depth enough. One reviewer said he or she would need to reference other works in order to learn more.

My justification for that: Good!

We cover a lot of topics in the book. Automated testing, continuous integration, dependency injection, object/relational mappers. Given the scope that we chose, we can’t get in depth. That’s the choice we made when outlining said scope. But if all we’ve done is piqued someone’s interest enough to seek out more information elsewhere, I’ll consider that a success.

That said, clearly we need to set expectations for the reader. One of the underlying themes of the book is to foster a sense of curiosity and, more importantly, a sense of pride in one’s work. To make the reader aware of potential new things and encourage them to delve deeper. In short, to start the journey, not to end it. This is where careful wording at the beginning will improve things, I think.

Next up, why we’re not going to take out the alcohol-fueled rants on datasets.